TRASHFUTURE - The Experience Economy Experience ft. Angus Harrison

Episode Date: April 9, 2018

Riley (@raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Milo (@Milo_Edwards) are joined by Angus Harrison (@a_n_g_u_s) who wrote the definitive article on why London is actually a stupid preschool, "The Experience Economy is Killing Youth Culture." If you hate zorbing, adult colouring books, and the other brainless shit that seems to be the only thing to do in Hell World, then this episode's for you.  Riley admits he once did the ultimate experience economy thing on a date. Milo defends the Bane impression monopoly. Hussein made pasta. Angus ran around in a giant ball. Here's a link to Angus' article: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/43a5nn/the-experience-economy-is-killing-youth-culture xoxo riley

Before we start talking about any of the normal content, I want to say that Trash Future officially no longer needs its listeners, because it has achieved the goal that it was set out to achieve, which is we got the Babestation like. We got a tweet faved from the official Babestation HQ. We're all Babestation.

We're all babes. And you know they went to a lot of trouble because it's really hard to get on Twitter on Anokia 3310. So it's so Milo, me, Milo and Hussain are sitting here rolling around on beds, holding old Nakia's. Boys are texting, are just texting us.

Want to see more, just cool. Texting, texting four digit numbers, saying what you up to. Oh, yeah. It's excellent. Finally, four digit numbers saying who are the hard left. It's like it's like it's like it's like it's like Gandhi said, you know, be the babe you want to see in the world.

Welcome to Trash Future. The podcast for the future is Trash. If we don't implement fully automated luxury gay space communism, buy a shirt, buy a shirt from Lil Comrade. Come on, a fire to send with a shirt. Join the Navy. And now we are officially officially liked by Babestation is a new tagline.

I am here with with my main, my main gentleman. I'm here with the classic, the three, the classic garbage men. Milo Edwards coming in from Moscow. The original boys. Yeah, it's it's me. It's me, Milo Edwards. I'm in a fucking atrocious mood and I'm very ill. So I'm very ready to talk about the content

and get incredibly incensed about it. I've also accidentally bought loose leaf tea instead of tea bag. So I'm picking tea out my fucking teeth. I thought I thought in Russia, what you do is like drink dill. Well, they do try and make you eat a lot. I did once have a pizza with dill on it. And I was very upset by that. You've just brought back a sort of PTSD.

It's a bit of a pass, to be honest. Yeah, PTSD is still we got still. We got is actually what the D in PTSD stands for. And here in here in the bougie, hackney flat, we also have Hussain. Hello, it's been a while since I've been here because we've been recording in the studio for the past few episodes, at least the ones that I've been on. And I've got to say, it still has that weird, damp smell to it.

What? And the smell of busting. Yeah, and thanks for I was trying to like segue into that joke because like Riley's going to be on his own for a while, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So the flat is just going to smell of down. No, I've got a lot of farm where I can run around with lots of other Riley's. No, I haven't been doing my dishes because I do my dishes before I need them because then I'm doing the minimum number of dishes I need. It's like just in time manufacturing.

You guys don't know anything about business, right? Like, honestly, it's like a bit pathetic. Like, have you ever even watched a Jay Shetty video? I came in to the flat and I just saw you like in your underwear reading Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules of Life, just trying to like bust one out. And when I was like, Riley, what the fuck are you doing? Angus is like right behind you. Oh, shit, we haven't introduced a guest.

Sorry. Yeah. Hi. We're so good at this. And yeah, and today we are joined by me having a peppercorn in my mouth from having eaten a very fine saucy soul. But we're also joined by Angus Harrison these days. We're joined by Angus Harrison, who you may know, formerly a vice. Yeah. Now of journalism. Yeah. Now of just the world.

Now I'm getting my life as opposed to whatever it is they do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, thanks so much for having me, guys. Woo. Very happy to be here on this beautiful part of year. Yeah, we're having podcast out. We're having podcast outside today. The heat of summer is here. The best thing about doing podcast outside is that Riley's neighbors walk past

and they always walk past when like he's doing some sort of bit about the extended station or just like Babestation. And we just give him this look. It's like this look of like not necessarily disappointment or weirdness, but just the fact that always this fucking kid again. I mean, they probably know they can hear through the walls, right? They like they surely they know what's going on. The same the same one that screams clean your room just as he busts.

Absolutely. It's like, you know, it's like you ever anyone can bust in a messy room. But you can only get someone pregnant in a clean room. Could you keep down the noise from endorsing people at LinkedIn after 11 p.m. Some of us are trying to sleep. The slap of your flaccid penis on the keyboard as you endorse someone once again for just in time manufacturing and anime knowledge is incredibly disturbing. These walls are paper thin, Riley, paper thin.

You know what's funny is people download and listen to this. That is funny. It's unbelievable. Riley and I were talking about this the other day, how I genuinely when when people went in so hard for the Call Me Book Club episode, I was so surprised that there were so many people in our listenership who were like here for like serious socialist commentary. And it's like, why do you listen to any of the other episodes?

Go home. What I have a real theory as to why that is that kind of plays into a bit of the stuff we're going to be talking about today because Angus is the author of many an article. What many an article or two? A practical content farmer, you might call me. OK, so welcome to Trash Future as a business podcast. We're talking about entrepreneurial ideas. We're talking about what's the best way to maximize your time.

I mean, for Angus would be a good guy to do it. OK, so no, in seriousness, we there's an article that's been circulating around our WhatsApp, Slack, MSN. I'm obsessed with it. MSN, Messenger, Bebo. And it's all about it's about this thing called the experience economy. And I don't know the title of it because the experience economy is killing youth culture. Yeah. OK, cool. As I'm as I'm basically a Frankfurt school obsessive.

So I thought millennials were killing youth culture. Well, no, we're getting to this because apparently millennials are the ones who really like the experience economy. Well, that's questionable. And we'll get on to that if we really like it at all. Maybe we just like eating on Mike. So the premise of the article was looking at these kind of new kind of events and experience activities that tend to happen in like cities like London.

So you might know them as like escape rooms or like giant ball pits. Some of us know giant ball pits better than others. We'll talk about that. That's what Riley goes, his bedroom. I guess like I guess like Iron Man things can also fit into that space. But that's also questionable. There's lots of like gym related stuff. Lots of like, you know, my cousins who are both like lawyers,

they keep what's happening, me saying, hey, we should go trampolining. And I kind of wonder, oh, my God, my normie cousin's doing that. Like, why the fuck would I want to go trampolining? Like, I don't understand. And the answer I usually get back is that, oh, it's fun. Stop being a spoil sport, which is also why lots of people end up in escape rooms. Right. Right. So that's kind of the premise of it.

And what your article was trying to do was all like what we kind of read it as was like trying to look at like the bigger political, like what's actually happening in like political economy to cause things like that. Yeah, totally. I think that's it. And I think something that you've picked up on there that is really like crucial to this is terrible cousins, besides your cousins, is that people immediately like I actually it took me quite a while almost to formulate my thoughts as to why I

sense something was up with this trend. But I wasn't like it took me a long while to work out what it was. I think because the face of it, it seems like the most obviously positive thing possible. It's, you know, it's young people turning their back on materialism. It's people wanting to try new things. In its essence, you think that that experience, that experiential thing should be really positive.

As a young person, I'm really into Cartesian dualism. Please go on. You know, people, you know, people turning their back on Cartesian dualism as well. This should be a positive thing, but I think therefore I bust. But yeah, what I think is also happening is that the headline of the article, this kind of suggestion is killing youth culture is obviously quite hyperbolic. But I think the reason for that being that it's seen as so unbelievably positive and this can only be a good thing that there is actually an undertone to this. There is a negative kind of drag to this trend in that people are basically

doing these very experiential things once for about like 25 quid and then never doing them again. So you don't actually get any kind of cultural consistency or any kind of yeah, investment in culture in that sense. Well, I mean, I mean, when I was when I was reading this, this, this article, sort of one of the things that sort of why it sort of made me kind of sort of react so strongly was that I saw it from like up, from like a Marxist perspective, right, where Marx thinks that humanity sort of humans gain a kind of rich,

full and meaningful life through labor and through doing the doing of things. And so Marx thinks that we gain meaning in our lives through labor and through the doing of stuff and the making of stuff even that why sort of capitalism was so alienating was that your labor is sort of abstracted away from you. So if you're an assembly line worker, what you make is what do you make while I screw a bolt into a thing? You know, then there's an end product and then, OK, well, off the end product goes and it's not really mine.

And so I'm laboring, but at no point does that labor were down to me. And then the sort of. And so what you so what we get, I think, is that is we a lot of people who sort of have lives that have no labor in them at all. Like a lot because a lot of the people who are doing this experience economy stuff are like management consultants or whatever. Right, totally. There are people there are people who have no

out of cost is their people specifically. No, well, almost no spit, it's which is and they then sort of seek some kind of external meaning by just participating in stuff. Yeah, but they're participating in stuff. So it's very just sort of handed down to them. So it's like it's a bit like a roller coaster totally. That's one of the and actually I think some of the funniest, like most fast school examples of this trend and these are things you can

actually do is where you get people doing soap making or basket weaving for for an evening. And I think I say in the article that I can't think of anything more late capitalism than doing basket weaving for an evening for 40 pounds with a real feudalism experience. Yeah, exactly. Right. It's like, yeah, like when I said I was going for surf lessons, you misunderstood.

Yeah, it's like amazing just how like, yeah, kind of straightforwardly experiential is the experience of just yeah, making shit just like sitting in a room like like weaving a basket and then getting a free glass of bubbly at the end of the evening is just to me like such a bizarre. And also like we should confront the other thing is that like so much of these experiential things are just shite like that's almost like beyond all the political kind of like undercurrents to this, there's so much of it is just like really naff like going somewhere to just like learn

how to shoot a crossbow for 45 minutes or Zorb football, which I've actually done on a stag do and is just it's just like the Zorb football is where you wear a Zorb around the top half of your body. So you're like encased in the Zorb and your little legs are like like Fred Flintstone driving his car like running underneath the Zorb, which means that people then like barge into you and you kind of you roll a bit. As I learned, actually, if you roll fully up, you then get stuck. So I spent a lot of mine with just the blood rushing to my head as my

Zorb was just the wrong way out. A little legal high. Yeah, it's like K2 spice. Yeah, I actually had the best time out of anyone. But you see it like this is soon what being a soldier will be like. This is your new protective gear. But yeah, so there's like Zorb football and there's a lot of these things. Actually, it's almost like the the the thrill of doing something new means

that you should try anything regardless of whether or not that thing is actually going to be any fun, like actually running around in a big plastic ball trying to play football is obviously not that fun. Football is fun. They invented it. It's like good. You run around, you play football, introducing a big like rubber bubble into that isn't necessarily going to be a more enjoyable.

I like the idea of a guy for a stag do being like, OK, I need to like have a weekend with the boys where I like do those things that I won't be able to do once I'm married. That's the sort of thing that my wife is going to forbid me from ever being able to do. And it's like, imagine and realise my fantasy of being a hamster. So is it is the stop kink? I feel like I should also say that I'm sure my mate who's

stag it was will listen to this and then be like, oh, well, fuck you. You are not getting back to the 10 year anniversary party. We all had a great time. But it was just like a classic example of an activity that like actually we all would have just knackered and everyone had like really bloody knees. And I would only respect if they did it at the actual wedding as well. Like all the groomsmen had to wear them and we're just constantly banterously charging into each other all of married life.

In fact, yeah, well, you know, if you really want to experience it, never take it off. Well, here's we've really really charged into the experience economy. Sort of discussion. I think we think we think we should do a little bit of table setting before we get any further, which is we have this this thing called the experience economy where I think it's it's it's that people want to rather than buying stuff, want to do stuff.

Yeah, I mean, I think above like the article that I wrote actually goes on a more specific kind of cultural phenomenon that's attached to that. The actual experience economy as a descriptive term just applies to yet the economy of doing rather than but it's also the other thing that I sort of noted from it is that it's there is there is no is that there are two unique elements to the experience economy as you define it, which is that it's never done in private. It's always sort of done publicly or at least in a way that's shareable

and busting and secondly, it's always a paint by numbers in effect. Yeah, it's either it's it's very sort of it's passive and to me it feels as though this is something that really that sort of exists that that couldn't really not just not just social media, but really dating apps. This is mostly so people have something to talk to each other about on dating apps because all of their jobs are basically the same. Yeah, completely. You're absolutely right about the shareable element of it.

I mean, there are some you'll read some writing about the experience economy that includes restaurants and pubs and going to the theater and going to the cinema because there has been an up there's been an uptick in that versus people buying things, but I kind of I think that is yeah, absolutely. But I think the actual the more like arse end of it, if you will, to use to use the official term 40, 40 quid a basket and above that, that I think that's where you it really betrays what's really going on the shareable aspect. The fact that yeah, you have this like focal activity, you like make a candle

with someone and suddenly then there's like a and I've actually had it. I mean, like when I was single, I would have it where you'd chat someone and then you'd be like, oh, let's go for a drink. And they'd say like, hey, do you want to go to this bar where there are hot tubs and you sit in a hot tub and have a drink in that? And obviously, I mean, I'm not I'm not topless now, but it's it's not, you know, it's not it's just I mean, yeah, these guys are because we're we have a Nokia. We have our Nokia phones.

We're getting calls right now. You're now a babe station in Dorset. That's the only way to. And it's England. So like when the sun's out, you have to take a shower. Yeah. Why do we live a Shreya state? God, I wish it's actually in Magna Carta.

Suns out, guns out. The living in this sort of naff preschool that is London now, because that's really what the experience economy is, is it turns the world into a dumb preschool for adult babies. I would I'm a Salafist at this point. I'm like I I'm a full Salafist. I believe in a very austere and an intense version of Islam. I I'm actually honestly, if it would kill the experience economy, I'm willing

to do away with representations of the human body. I don't need those as much as they hate the experience economy. Riley, what are you talking about? You spend like the majority of your day watching pornography. Like what would you do? You got me, no, I would rebalance on brand for you. I'd rebalance. I'd I'd focus on Marxist literature and I go 100 percent in as opposed to

my current 50-50 of just porn and anger against bullpits, basically. So Riley would bust thinking about the Hedith. Oh, technically fine because the Hedith is not a holy text. It's it's not it's not wrong. It's supplementary literature. It's secondary literature. I just lost the Babestation endorsement.

So I mean, what? I don't think the Babestation I don't think Babestation is really that committed to the sayings of the profit or anything. That's Sufi, right? So they're probably fine. Yeah, though, my my favorite thing is an alloy. Can we talk about like Tough Mudder and stuff? Oh, we can.

Actually, I kind of as we sort of get into that, I kind of want to talk about what I want to get a just a list. What are some examples of some experience economy activities? We covered what we kept alluding to the ball pit. But we've talked about sort of Zorb football and basket making. Escape rooms are big ones to these rooms where you're locked in a room and then you have a kind of like a crystal maze-esque challenge to try and work your way out of it.

Like a big real life version of Cluedo that never ends. I mean, you've got the bougie ones like wine tasting. Yeah. And I saw one where it's like wine tasting in like they had separate rooms and like the rooms there were different temperatures or like different types of like fresh air pressure in the room. What air? Different air pressure. So fucking stupid. In the last room, your skull is crushed.

You get asphyxiated while trying to walk. With a lovely bottle of sunset. It's really... No, really, like, guys, there's actually no way that the only way you could enjoy a pomeran is if you actually have been squashed down like an accordion. And you've got like piano key teeth. I mean, like cooking is a cloma. Cooking is a classic one.

And actually, cooking is an interesting one because I actually mentioned this in the article, like I have been on it. Like I really like cooking is something I'm really into and like I've been on a cookery course and I was a bit loath to throw that in with it. But then it totally is part of it. It is part of it. Like there's no way around that as much as I enjoyed doing that. I mean, there's lots of ones that because I because obviously like we're all

like similar age, except for Riley, who's like 35. It's literally not true. So like, you know, so we're at the age when like people are getting married and like, you know, thinking about having kids and all that stuff. And, you know, for large, for large, like fail, sons like us, like we were like, shit, we've got to like, you know, sort our lives out. Like, what the fuck are we doing? Just like seeing around, doing a podcast in the middle of the day to go to a

class to make Larry, but really expressive shirts for the boardroom. Perfect for the boardroom. And the disco taught by a successful entrepreneur. You know, so the ball pit is part of these escape rooms like sort of designed for guys who like, you know, they want to like develop themselves as like better people, right? So training for Guantanamo Bay. I think it's that they don't think it's that they want to develop themselves as better people, is that I think they want they're desperate to become more interesting.

Yeah, I think that's that's kind of the type of like what connects all of it is the idea of wanting to look like you're the most diverse, kind of interesting. And this comes back to the shareable thing, right? Like if your Instagram story features you doing like a terrarium workshop. Yeah. Oh, Christ, classic one during the summer, which is like these guys who are like holding on to who are like, who've just done tough mudder stuff. They're like, yeah, they, you know, holding like they're my protein, like shakers. The work thing, doing the wank thing and their caption was always just like, I went

through like, you know, I went through all these like electrocutions to get here, but hashtag worth it or something like that. Yeah, it's something that you shake and you get protein out of it, but it's definitely not gay. It's not gay if it's a tough mudder. I once heard, I once heard Tough Mudder described quote unquote as a marathon for cunts, which I, I disagree with only in so far as I think regular marathons are marathons for cunts. Like I really, like I really dislike anyone who runs marathons. And I say that as someone who likes doing sport, but like marathons are just like medically

proven to be like really bad for you and people only do them to show off. It's the only reason to run a marathon. It's to be like, look, I run a fucking marathon. It's like, go fuck yourself. I don't think 10 Ks are much more, much more go there. Like I feel like with a 10 K and I have, I have done a 10. These are the things I've like done a ton of the stuff that I've slated in this article. Like I've done a 10 K and actually after it was just like, I'm not going to do that again.

We've only done two Ks. Well, speak for yourself. I'm a very strong runner. Sucking dick while my man run in 10 K. I was like, fuck. This is like Milo's the comedian, but they don't. I think that I think they're a part of it. I think they're the they're the sort of acceptable end of it.

As in like, if you run a marathon, everyone kind of has to do that slightly reverent, like, oh, well, then you are that study is a super human achievement. Where it's like, what I kind of want to get into, though, is we say, like, what's the difference between loving cook, loving cookery and doing a cookery course to get better at cookery and an experience economy activity. So I think for me, one of the big hallmarks of the experience economy would be whether you did a six month pasta making course or whether you did a maybe one night. I don't know, like tortellini making workshop, like a workshop thing where you go

possibly with someone you've never met before, like on a like a date or, you know, just like a couple of friends, you get a bit pissed while you're doing it and you make it. And then that's it. Like it ends after you leave that room. There is no kind of legacy from that experience. So God, imagine going on a six month pasta making course, only then to discover what everyone else already you, which is that you can buy in a fucking shop. It's like the most it's like the bit of the meal that the quality of it makes the least

difference, like go on a six month fucking sauce making course. I mean, I mean, I made pasta last week, right? Yeah, I made it. I was it took a lot of time. It like I rolled it out and like I do it. And then I put it in them and I made it. It was like, fuck's sake, this tastes exactly the same. This tastes exactly the same as like the happy shopper stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was worse because like it's sort of stuck together anyway. Yeah, it's a real pain in the ass making pasta. But I just I think I guess what I'm basically getting is it depends what the what the end goal is. And if your end goal is to I mean, it sounds so awful because like if the end goal is to have a fun evening, then it's like you're a dick for saying that somebody shouldn't do that.

But I think when all these are almost often trades is one of the weirdest things. Like trades are kind of packaged as fun evenings. There's something very odd about that. There's just something that strikes me as like clearly something's gone wrong at some stage if like making like a one hour roof tiling work. Yeah, I mean, that's so I so wouldn't be that shocked to see that there was like like a tile making a terracotta tile making or like I bet there's a plant pot one that definitely is because our economy is just so abstracted at this

point that I don't think anyone knows what I don't think any if you asked anyone what their job is and you sort of talking about it for more than five minutes, they would probably admit to you that they don't do anything. No, I admit, I say that to people before they even ask about my job. Riley has that on a t-shirt. Oh, Edie, make me that t-shirt. But right, like it's most people. I don't think they think they really do anything.

I think most people just think that they sort of go into an office and no one notices that they're not doing anything. And then they spend another day not getting fired because no one's noticed that they don't do anything, that they just sort of copy something from one spreadsheet to another and then back to the other spreadsheet. And I think there is, there is this, as I was saying earlier with Marx, like there is this innate human desire to do and make something and to sort of see yourself reflected in the world.

And it's like in many ways, you know, this, it gives you a way in, it gives you a way into doing that, or it gives you a way into feeling like you're somehow not wasting your life because we're all paying like fucking half of our income in rent to just live in this city. We want to somehow get something out of it. And that's like, and that's also where it feeds into a whole social media thing. Right. So like, I'll go on Instagram like every weekend and, you know, you'll see people

like either taking pictures and I'm guilty of this as well. Like they'll take pictures of things that they've cooked or like things that they've made, or it's not even like the things that I see online on. Yeah. Hussain, your Instagram is so normie. Yeah. It's like two different people between Twitter and Instagram. Yeah.

I feel like I have a different person on every social media feed when you make something and you're innately proud of the thing that you've made. And this is where I also don't want to like shit too much on like these experience economy things, especially things that kind of at least if you're giving someone like a little bit of like meaning or like self-worth at a time when like they're working in jobs, which innately like try to remove them from that, then holistically, that's a good thing. Right.

Um, yeah, I just, I think what I question is whether or not people are actually getting the, the good feeling that you'd think you'd maybe assume they were getting. I actually think this is different. I think if you make pasta like in your kitchen and then you cook it for your friends and you serve them the pasta with just it within your flat, I think then yeah, totally like, I can totally see how that has like a holistic, uh, value. But I think there's something about the, the performance of these experiences. And the novelty of them, which is like, it's not actually built necessarily.

It's almost not built around the actual activity you're doing. Like there's very little of ironically for something that's so, uh, built on the idea of living for the moment. Actually, the moment itself almost is the moment of least worth. It's about like, It's about like capturing that moment. Can't, yeah, exactly. Well, exactly.

It's about tricking people into thinking you did something, which is why I regularly invite my friends around for an unforgettable luncheon when in reality what I've done is I've bought fast food and described it and disguised it as my own cooking. Here's the thing. If you talk to me for long enough, I will somehow find a way to bring it back around to Adorno and Horkheimer, my boys, um, where we talk about how like tend to buy it, we talk about how like if the culture industry, and this is

certainly a part of the culture industry, is designed not just to sort of distract and propagandize as, you know, like someone like Noam Chomsky might have argued laterally, but it's designed to just sort of amuse and infantilize. Um, that all you're really doing is that you're, you're, you're thinking about your own identity as, as stuff that you consume. And the fact is, I think an experienced economy consumption, a material consumption, commodity fetishism, it's different, basically not at all. It's only incidentally different.

It's just the commodity you're fetishizing is a way in which you're somehow superficially altering yourself. Totally. I totally agree. I think that there is a false dichotomy to suggest that this is a break with materialism. It's not, it's not actually a break with, um, wanting to cover an object because of what it speaks to your identity.

This is just like an extension of that and moving that into the experiential space, basically. I think, I think really that's what commodity, I think that's a lot of what sort of the concept of commodity fetishism was all about is, and I mean, look, I'm going to steer hard into Lacan at this point. Uh, because look, like an over self driving guy, I'm going to steer hard into Lacan at this point. No, um, that's the thing.

It's, look, look, listeners, I can talk about this or beating off your choice. Um, but that everyone's, everyone's desire, the two genders is, is me. Look, um, this has become the Rick and Morty fan base. People are sort of fundamentally sort of discontented and alienated and are deeply desirous of change and look and, and so you sort of keep moving. And this is where like, like, like, like, like Lacan talks about, like, does like the impossibility of the fulfillment of desire is that you keep going to these external sources, whether that's a commodity or whether

that's a fucking nude pasta making class. Like you keep thinking that this will finally be the thing that transforms you. And it never is. And so you end up on the same hamster wheel and it never ends. Yeah, or, or in a hamster suit, the same Zor ball, baby. I think it's also really connected to London that you referenced London early, but I think there's like no mistake that like, I just don't think this is, I mean, I'm from Bristol, originally, and you see like a bit of this,

but nowhere near in the way that you see in London. And it makes so much sense to me that there's this, the sort of falseness of London is inherently married to the kind of artificiality of these bizarre exercises in like allotment tending or, you know, like, yeah, pasta making or all these things. I just think it's also inherently, you know, whether it's like wanting to experience what it's like to make something or just wanting to experience what it's like to almost imagine that you have a culture.

It's also just like wanting to kind of say that you're more than just like an office person, right? Like there's a reason why like the people who go to escape rooms or go to these kinds of classes tend to exist, tend to like exist within a certain like demographic of new London worker. So there will be the same type of worker who like, you know, they spend the majority of their time working in like some sort of management finance job not really sure what they're doing or why they're there, but also realizing

that like they worked really hard to kind of get this job in London, especially if like, and I've noticed this, especially from people who live outside of the city as well, right? So people that I went to school with because I come and still live from living Kent, but other people I went to university with who like came from like various small northern towns, like Grantham and everything. So you build up this expectation of what London should be. Yeah, exactly.

You've got to like fulfill that because otherwise what was the fucking point? And like the amount of people that I know who have been in like their management consulting jobs for like two, three years. And initially it was like, great, because like I love working long hours and I love like, you know, going up in my perspex building and everything to the point now where it's just like, what the fuck am I doing? Why am I paying 900 pounds? Yeah, and they go to his pasta making classes and it was like, oh, that's great.

I really wish I could like move to Italy and just like be a pasta maker. But that's the other thing, right? Like it's that if we have to differentiate London, this happens in New York as well. But if you have to differentiate these extraordinarily expensive, very time consuming places that we all have to live in to do jobs we hate, it's because, well, you can't do a pasta making class in Grantham. They don't offer it anyway. Trash Future Past.

Make a class for me in class. One night only it's that feeling. It's that feeling of sort of specialness, I think it's that feeling of almost of sort of full spontaneity and it's totally totally and it's basically. Oh, yeah, I mean, let's we let's we forget that London is a city in which the nightclub Inferno's Clapham continues to exist, which is like, it is literally a daycare for the worst cunts that I went to university with. That's all it is.

Like I once I'm going to tell this story. I might have told it on the podcast before, but fuck it. I once got dragged to Inferno's Clapham by my laddiest friend. And after after bumping into a load of people that I'd forgotten existed from Cambridge, who I really never wanted to see again, I went to the toilet for a break from those people and a guy sidled up to me. Now, what you forget about Inferno's Clapham is that there are two types of cunt who go there, but they're different.

You've got Shweffi Oxbridge cunt, cunt type, genotype number one. Then you've also got like Essex lad on a massive night out cunt. And that's how I bumped into in the toilet, who's sidled up next to me at the urinal and said, like, Oh, mate, this has got to be the best night out in the Southeast. I didn't reply. He then decides to go further. He goes, the standard of birds in here is absolutely outrageous.

At which point, I said, perhaps you should make an official complaint. He breezed over that because at this point, another man entered the toilet and went past him to try and get into the cubicle. Our man wheels around going, Oi, mate, got any Charlie and begins pissing against the wall. Inferno's Clapham, that's who the experience economy is for. I also think you can divide people who use the word Charlie for Coke into an entire separate subset of human beings.

I just can't, like, I actually don't. I don't think I've ever actually met them. I have only heard of them. So I went to an experience economy thing last week, actually, for one of my mate's birthdays. Make your own manga class. No, no, no, no, no, thank you for ruining my birthday. Surprise for everyone.

You're not invited. I mean, like I was just going to beam you up from a screen anyway, but like now fuck off. Skypin. No, I went to something. I went to like a golf thing. So it was like you're in Miss Bar in somewhere in Morgay. Oh, right. They're like junkyard golf things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, you know, like nine hole putt golf where and like I went in. I knew it was going to be shit. Like I knew it was going to be terrible, but it was one of those things where I was like, OK, fuck it, like, you know, you kind of have to go do it. And you spend most of the time just like waiting for other people to like drunk and like put this whole and you could like separate the type of guys who like enjoyed it and the ones who didn't.

And the ones who enjoyed it always wore like the same type of like short sleeved, like collar shirt, Chelsea boots, like a bit of like, you know, fitted jeans and everything. They all have like the same faded haircut. And we're all just like, mate, mate, mate, two in one, mate. Like if you're wearing a short sleeve collared shirt, you are definitely from Essex. That's anyone who's not from Essex wearing that, that's cultural appropriation. That's experience economy Morse code.

And it was just like, you know, and at the end, it was like, it wasn't, I mean, OK, maybe some people find it fun. So maybe some people want to get on to that. And I don't want to be like, I don't want to get too deep into it because, OK, it's like, you know, if you live in London and it's like something like a birthday or something, where is that question of like, well, what do you do? And actually, there's a really important point to this as well, which is, OK, like, as you said, lots of people rent their properties in London, right?

And they have landlords who are like, you can't have like fucking parties in like my house or you can't have it in the flat. You have less people who are willing to go to my... In my opinion, landlords into the sun. So like, if you're like in your early 20s, it might be really good. It might be really easy to have a house party or something. I find that like it's harder later on. So you're like, OK, what can I do that can be done in relatively few hours?

Isn't that expensive? Can be enjoyed by everyone. You're looking to kind of please everyone as well. And I think those types of events, like sort of, yeah, they exist for like people who just aren't happy with cocaine and like Rick and Morty. The I think I do think you touch on something crucially, which is just that people have limited options and of things to do and eventually

hanging out with the same group of people at the same couple of pubs is just going to get boring. I think that's really interesting, though. Like that I think speaks to a generational shift, though, right? Because why is that boring? That's what like our parents did. That's what generations have done for a long time in this country is basically go to the same pubs, the same nightclubs.

Like I find nightclub steak in this really interesting. Like I've written, I basically was almost exclusively wrote about nightclubs for a couple of years and some of the best nights out in the southeast. Largely about infernos, actually. It's worse than anything Dante could have imagined, ironically. You were saying about nightclubs. Basically, there was a statistic that came out in like 2016. I now will completely butcher and not remember that basically the UK

had lost like over half its nightclubs. Like everyone was talking about it loads and one of the main things people put that down to was this idea that like people just aren't really interested in nightclubs in the same way that they were. Yeah. And it's as though there's been a shift towards the idea of going to a place like going to a nightclub over and over again. I mean, if you say take like New York in the 1970s, you have very few

nightclubs of no and very few DJs of no. It's like the same thing weekend after weekend. You go to this nightclub because, you know, this DJ is going to be there on a Saturday night and it's going to be good. We would never go for that shit now. We'd never go for the idea of like, oh, I know that I will always go to this nightclub on a Friday night because there's this resident DJ who I really like.

We've we kind of like bounce across the map of London trying like a different nightclub each weekend because there's going to be like a dance floor that has to make it. You know, which one has the best tour to leave the workshop going? You know, that's a I genuinely think it's because people are obsessed with this effect, with this idea that they can never not be self improving somehow. They must all it's as we are sold. This idea that even in our leisure time, we must improve ourselves.

Even in our leisure time, we must we must be learning stuff. It's you can never just sit down and get drunk by a fucking canal. You have to be going to a workshop at the same time. You have to be fucking like experience economy, like being a tramp workshop. I mean, a really interesting chance of special brew included. An interesting window into that is the the interested button on a Facebook event. What is the interested button other than a way of saying to lots of people, I am interested. It's the way I keep my diary.

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's that there is a useful element to it. But then why is there not just in a way of saving something privately? I mean, there is just this thing of like, you click a button to express your interest in something that then like publicly goes up on everyone else's newsfeed. Yeah, I don't know. Events are just labeled jihad and I'm just there clicking interesting. Why PG London meetup? Past the making included.

I was just thinking about what you were saying about nightclubs and how like it's a really London thing to be like, you know, let's try London nightclubs across the city, right? So where I live in Kent and the few people who have kind of like remained, you haven't like moved to like Peckham or Hackney and stuff. Like they're all they're the kind of people who will like on Saturday evenings, they will take the same train to Central London and will go to the same club and will usually be this club in like Lester Square or be like a club in,

you know, one of the big ones that like these people exist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, even as I was saying earlier, like even in Bristol, like Manchester, which is where I studied, like you get you get much more of an affiliation to a place. I sort of I sort of wonder whether like the experience of being someone who like lives in lives in London, like proper London and like the suburban commuter, like that experience when it comes to because I feel like I feel like a lot

of these escape rooms, a lot of these like activities and stuff are also partially designed for like the type of people who still think that like going to London on a night out is like a really fun thing to do, which maybe like we've sort of tired from as a result of like the night out in London is the opiate of the masses. We're rising about in between this episode. And then did you ever watch the in between? No, paper station only. Paper station.

I did back in the day I was 15. Don't judge me. So no, no, I still think I still think it's a great show. And there was like that show where like they all the whole show was about them going to a club in London and half the episode was them just really hyping up like how amazing like London would be. And they went to like the shitest nightclub and it was basically just they basically went to like infernos in Clapham, right?

And everything went wrong. One of them having a cut Belland. I remember that being like a main plot point of the episode. It ended in one of like cutting its penis, right? Yeah, you know, like trash boys night out, but it still resonates because those other types of conversations that a lot of people who live in Kent like have about going to London, right? It was like, yeah.

So a big night out with the lads. Completely. And I think it also just speaks to the slightly just transient nature of like people's relationship with London now. None of us live in flats longer than like a year or two years. You know, maybe you don't even live in the same area for that long. So no one has that idea of like fixed. I think almost in a way like some people who even live in London who still

probably feel a little bit like they're commuters who've like traveling in because it does feel it has that kind of like otherness to it. And also the sensation that it's like, I don't know if maybe this is going off in London too far, but I've always found since I moved to London about three and a half years ago, almost to this feeling that London had kind of happened and now there was like a shiny version, like this, this new thing they'd built that was doing an impression of London. I was like, like a theme park.

Yes, absolutely. It's, it feels the Dan nine and of cities. Comedian Dan. I don't. It's we used to have London, but apparently it was just someone trying to charge the Samsung Galaxy S seven. That's what it is. That's what this fucking city is, isn't it?

It's a place to just charge our electronic devices for a while in a bakery in 1666. Well, it's like it's the same. It's to me, I honestly, this I think one of the reasons I was sort of so amped to this episode is that it it would really get out. It would be sort of a cathartic of all of my frustrations with this fucking city, which is that it does feel it's not really London. It's London land.

Yeah, it's it's it's it's everything is sort of abstracted kind of one level up of we have no one actually does anything here anymore. It's also like a very upper middle class experience. Oh yeah, absolutely. So like the things that we're talking about, like let's be kind of honest here, like we talk about it because we occupy a certain social position in the city where like this stuff is really orientated towards us. Like escape rooms have been built in places where like there were job

centers and you know, home like law centers and like, yeah, stuff like that, right? There's like one in London Bridge. Many ways the job center is like an escape. You will only ever get out of it if you fulfill a very specific and odd set of criteria. You are genuinely play acting, not being an upper middle class early career professional. You're play acting, having to do something.

You're play acting, having to exist with stakes. Yeah, you are play acting, not living in essentially and actually as an interesting side note, I'll come to our podcast. You're play acting as a side note to that. The first time I actually registered the experience economy as a thing was not actually in London or with people my age. It was with my parents who my dad started buying. He always fucked up buying stuff.

My mum bought like a wash bag, three Christmases running. We'll always get it wrong. And then he twigged if he bought my mum tea at the Ritz or like a gin and tonic tea at like a Mayfair hotel where they just go up. So they live in Bristol, they'll get a megabus up to London, have tea at the Ritz or whatever for an hour with these vouchers. These like red letter day things and then get the megabus back again. I was going to say, this is like a mega bus experience economy.

It's very red letter day. It's also very like apprentice. Yeah. You know, we always have that apprentice episode where it's like you've got to make some sort of experience. Totally. But the class thing really struck me with my parents in terms of coming from like a very just, I mean, I come from Bristol, which I feel always conjures

images in people's minds of like quite nice Victorian houses and sort of like, but like, yeah, there is that. But like, I'm much more like the kind of there's a suburban boring shit into it, which is where I grew up. Uh, do you grew up in Lockleys? Anywhere in Bristol? No, no, no, no, no, you know Bristol. Well, um, how do you know Bristol?

That's a story for another day. I fucked all over this country, man. It was a summer set in Avon was the last county that Riley had yet to fasten. So basically long story short, what I really observed very early with them is the very naked aspirational class aspirational thing for them. It's like they are lower middle class people who are my mum really enjoys that she could pay not that much money necessarily in order to put on a nice hat, go into the Ritz, have tea and like really small cucumber sandwiches,

which is kind of rip off your thing. Like you kind of paid a bit of money to make it a bigger sandwich, but to really just to have that indulge in that experience and then leave it again literally on a megabus. Like it's such a kind of basic. Yeah. I mean, it's, I mean, it is like the purest form of this. It's like a very pure form of escapism, right?

Right. And I've sort of, I've noticed this, like when you look at like deals or like if you're looking for like birthday gifts or something like that, like loads of them, loads of that stuff like comes up. I saw, I was looking for a birthday gift for, I was looking for a Mother's Day gift for my mum and loads of stuff I saw in like last minute deals and stuff. I wasn't looking for anything specifically, but it was kind of like, you know, you can go on like a yachting, you can go on like a cruise or you can

go on like more like red letter day stuff or like lots of writing for ice, this experience. One of the big things was like, yeah, afternoon tea at the Carlton Hotel, right? Yeah. I sort of, I mean, I sort of see the, and you also, when you go to Fortnum & Mason, if you ever go to Fortnum & Mason, I don't recommend it. Unless of course you're the Anarchist Group pretty gang from North London and you just go in and like take it over for a day, in which case definitely go to

Fortnum & Mason. They have, they have like a tea room, like downstairs or something. And if you go down, like the people who are doing it are all like, they're either Chinese tourists or they're like, I guess people like your parents, right? They've come because specifically for that experience. And I think, and again, it sort of goes back to like, if you do not live in London or you don't kind of like, if you're not like the young kind of

professional who works in the city, maybe there's an appeal to those things that like we just don't feel because we have connotations to like the people who kind of not only create, not only like indulge in them, but actually like create them, right? Well, like I said, it makes sense, right? That my parents want to do tea at the Ritz, whereas largely people who are our age, who live in London, what they want to do is basket weaving or, you know, like a pottery class, because they, they, they want to feel the, like the,

the experience that is not like the roar, adrenaline, thrill. My question is, I need to feel alive. My question is, right? Like every time, because I, I, I find myself sometimes if I'm in sort of groups of more Normass friends, like having to say, I, I, it's not really my, you guys go, go ahead. I'm not really going to do it. They're like, oh, Riley, it's just fun.

I find myself having to respond to that quite a bit. And this is why you end up in a bull pit once a week. Once ever, once ever, who said, and it was for sex, I did it for sex, and I'm never going to do it again, and I'm embarrassed. I'm embarrassed. I ever did it and she was very attractive. Can you describe what the actual, what the experience was like? Not the sex.

I mean, the bull pit. And that's how I was thrown out of the pirate activity play center. Look, okay. Never go back there. I'm just intrigued cause like the bull pit is one that I've heard about, but it's just too, I can't, the ball pits, the example of this thing. You've been adopted the ball pit where we talk about, I was born in it. I was born in it.

More than by a plastic. I do the pain impression now, my love. I'm being when the ball pit is covered with my semen. Then you have my permission to eject me from the facility. Every day I can't, every day I think we're going to do a really smart show and it never happens. You're going to, you're going to tell us about your ball pit experience. I just want to know what it was actually like in, in, in sight amongst the balls.

Here's the, here's the thing. It's stored in the ball. Balls deep, if you will. It, um, okay. Here's the thing. Like our main topic of discussion, right? On this whole thing is it ultimately the experience economy, whether it's our generation or our parents' generation, it's ways to kind of participate in a

little bit of something that you think is going to somehow transform you momentarily and passively. And it's a little bit like going to the cinema. You're just sort of, it's a, it's a momentary experience that's then very much done and it's just like commodity fetishism. I think the ball pit bar, cause there's a bar in London that is, has a ball pit in it. So, but I think, but ultimately the thing, the reason I think it's infantilizing is that, that this whole concept is infantilizing, not the ball pit, but the premise, the

experience economy itself is infantilizing is that it's so passive. It's that it's essentially just different ways to act out, doing a coloring in book. You know, it's like, it's, you go to a pasta making class and you can do as, you can, you can sort of execute it well or poorly, but very little of you goes into it. It's just your sort of incidental to the whole process. And I think the ball pit is the, or example of that, because it is just you doing a baby activity. There's, you're not even pretending that you're acting anything.

You're not, you're not pretending that you're even acting on the world anymore. You're just jumping around in some balls. And the issue for me with that is that it is a baby activity and it's largely you just saying, I'm going to be a baby now. I'm, because my life is garbage and I want to go back and rather than make it better, I want to go back to a time where I didn't realize it was garbage yet. I think also, I mean, the tension we keep coming up against is this thing that in not wanting to participate in that, your colored as a cynic, perhaps the most

kind and also it comes down to that thing of like, I've often been made to feel like I'm being pretentious. Like, oh yeah, people are going to call us pretentious for doing this episode. But in a way, I think we're calling us pretentious, but for having, for having a podcast, eating like soft French cheeses on Mike. I don't understand why they call us pretentious, but I think, I think also it's part of owning being pretentious and like owning why people react against you, like when people are negative about my reaction to some of these, like more

yeah, it's fun. Like, so I was actually in the pub with maybe often you talked about the word fun, the other, like just now, um, I was in the pub with some friends the other night and we were talking about something, must be talking about something very similar and I genuinely took a drag of a cigarette, uh, like a war veteran and then said, uh, fun is a very dangerous word is one of the worst things there's ever, it's one of the worst sentences has ever left my, but it's totally what I mean.

It like, and again, it's like, it sounds really pretentious, but I know exactly what I mean when I say that as pretentious as it sounds, because there's actually a lot of value in pretentiousness and in the sort of like long term investment of taking something seriously and valuing something beyond, um, it just being fun, like, oh, but this is just kind of fun. Like, well, I don't, you want to do that because it's fun and that's what matters, right? Because we're not working now.

We're having fun. Um, that sort of culture needs to be like fed into like for it to kind of be facilitated needs to be like part of the wider, I guess not, not even like the socio economic like culture, right? Because at the moment it's one of those things where if you want to take pride in your extracurricular activities, you shouldn't even call them extracurricular activities, they should be like part of your own being. Yeah, but I think because there is no curriculum anymore.

Yeah, there's no curriculum anymore, but it's sort of like, I think for a lot of these young people who like they go to school, they go to university, even they go straight to these corporate jobs and like my sister works in one of these corporate jobs and I've seen like what her schedule looks like and is pretty much like going to school back to school again. You have your time sectioned off, like really, like really neatly. So it sort of feels as if it's a curriculum, even if like you're trying to go to the toilet at McKinsey, they write your name on the board and

take time to take a break. Um, so like even if you've left school in theory, like that culture like still totally, totally. And it's why you get this really sharp line drawn. It's playtime basically, right? That's what this is. It's like, oh, it's playtime now. The bell has rung.

So we all run out and do terrarium workshops. Like it's, it's this very weirdly clear line. I think it really connects to our attitudes towards the arts in this country and how like terrarium workshop sounds like a new metal band from the early 2000s. Fresno Neil loves them. It's also why like whenever, so all my, all my family, like they all like, except for me because I'm like the dumb fail son, um, they all have like professional jobs working in the city, right?

They all work in like similar looking offices. They all wear like the similar types of suits. They all have like the same hours, right? They're even doing like nine to six. None of them would ever like some of us like to make more flamboyant shirts. Look, I'm, look, I'm going to give, I'm going to give a white coat shirts to my cousin and if he doesn't like it, then I'm just like cutting off all ties and the white coke tie as well.

You know, none of, none of them will ever think about like, let alone like taking time out during a day to record a dumb podcast, like actually starting a podcast to begin with, right? Because it's not, that's not part of like how they've sort of been conditioned to be, you have to be like completely broken like us. But I was actually saying, I see a one hour podcasting workshop. Yo, if some like, if some like fucking sad office douchebag wants to like pay us like, I don't know, 400 quid to like do a one hour podcasting experience

workshop with them, we'll throw it in. Hey, look, you know, we can partner up with like the Romaniacs or Oh, policy in America. Yeah, totally. I'm sure they're part of the Looney Tunes universe before. Yeah, yeah, I would absolutely be. I think we know we need to do is like, yeah, you, you show up at a place that's just like my flat.

It's the Riley's flat land and then you sit and we record a podcast and a Supreme hoodie at the door, which you have to keep on at all times. I'm not wearing anything by Supreme Milo. Fuck you. Do you know, it's fucked up. I can, I'm so sure this exists. Like I'm so sure you can go somewhere and like sourdough. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that you get an email to you afterwards of it. It's like, Hey guys, pick room on here and send a podcast to you. And it's like 10 minutes long. And it's you talking about like what you did last week. I bet I bet that it's you talking about what you did last week and the experience economy. It's like, it's you talking about your terrarium workshop. And so, okay, so speaking of, I did go to the ball pit bar.

Yes. I did it. I did it some, some months previously. Do you? Sorry, I did not inhale. I went to the ball pit bar. I did not inhale. Do you buy a drink and then get in the ball pit or is there a bar bordering?

That's the weird thing is it's a bar that and here's the. Oh, here's the other crazy fucking experience economy thing about it, which is that it's all the cocktails are themed on old candies. So really it's, yeah, a common be like, it's like, be a kid, but be so drunk that you act like a kid and come here on Tinder dates. It really is, it's just, it is, it is a version of adulthood that's only incidentally different from childhood. Wait, how old are these candidates?

How old are we talking? Are we talking like hard boiled and not very tasty? Or are we talking like gollywags on the packaging? So what you get, and then you can have drinks and you just, okay, then someone says you can get in the ball pit now. Well, you have to wait for that permission. Yeah, you booked time. Wow.

Yeah. And then you can't bring your drink in. What? Yeah, you can't bring your, you have to just be in the ball pit minus a drink. I genuinely don't know what I do. I stood around uncomfortably. Do you just like throw balls at people? You're supposed to dive in and play in it.

That's how big you're like, you could have a fucking. 50% of the ball pits clientele are like people who are really actually genuinely into it. And then the other 50% are people who are like irony poison podcasters who are being dragged and are like, oh, maybe this can be content later. But because of irony, holy shit, I'm just like the rest of them. And he looked from irony podcaster to normie and back from normie to irony podcaster and he found he could no longer tell the difference. But the question that like, I feel that we're getting towards is like, what happens now?

Like, is this going to be like a permanent part of like our economy? And I think, because this obviously fits into like this wider kind of economic change, at least in this city anyway, where, you know, most jobs that are being created are like short term contracted jobs, but like things like Uber and delivery, and then the ones that are kind of more permanent with like more stable contract, like these boring fucking office jobs, which sort of like feed the experience economy to begin with, right? So it feels again, like just with lots of this normal economy, it feels like this giant like human centipede. And like, I feel that there's lots of people who sort of when they kind of

think about it, they're like, actually, yeah, there are a lot of problems with this, but you'll sort of encourage not to think too deeply. Like, so this is also why like my cousin sort of berate me every time I'm like, why the fuck would I want to go trampolining? Because they give the same answer as like your mates, right? Which is why are you like, you know, stop kind of thinking like this and just like, go have fun. Like what's wrong with you? Just loosen up. Yeah, enjoy this on a surface level. Yeah, it's like, just loosen up, stop kind of thinking too much about it. And I sort of see

some sense in that just because of like, I think if you kind of delve too much in, it can really like fuck up your mental health and totally totally. But then at the same time, like I'm a dumb like podcast with a broken brain and like, I'm never going to know this is the thing. It's like, I actually have learned that it's really important to be like, yeah, all of this is totally true. But then again, if like, if all my friends say like, oh, let's go to the crazy golf bar, like I will probably, I will still have a good, like a good time if I go to a bar where I get drunk and play like, create like, do you know what I mean? My kind of like, well, actually experience economy speaks

to a broader malaise that wears off after like the third drink. It does not wear off with me, baby. If anything intensifies, if anything, I get louder and more Marxist. But I think in terms of like an end point, I think what is obvious to me is that like, it's so inherently married to so much else about London and capitalism at its current stage that actually I don't see it being something. I don't think this particular strain of culture is just going to like, oh, actually, this is kind of dumb. Let's go back to like, like, it's, it's a quite,

it's reaching prices to ground from happiness. It's a thing. It's never, it's never gone away. Like this is, this is, because this, this is what we were talking about in like the dialectic of enlightenment, right? This is what we're talking about the Dorneau and Harkheimer. This is what we're talking about Giseb Ward. Like it's been like this forever. It's just, it's now, it's just as every element of sort of capitalism has, it's become more naff and stupid and obvious than it ever was. And but that's the process of it just, that's its own contradiction. It's the, it's that capitalism creates its own kitsch. It creates its own stupidity and it will just continue sort of being this kind of plastic simulacrum of itself over and over and over again.

And it's going to get worse and worse and worse. Hey, that's awesome. I mean, like, oh, look, I'll talk about this on a commie book club, but like my, it's an aesthetic objection that has at the root of everything that I say. Do you know PewDiePie has a book club now? Yeah. Well, I have one too. I don't, and also I don't drop doing a heating gaming moment. Yeah. I don't, I don't, if I have like a heated Marxism moment, I don't do slurs. I feel that could be actually the point of redemption. The thing that Milo said, which is a video games, I feel like video games are the thing that's going to be like the thing that will destroy like the experience economy as it exists. You wonder where like VR fits into this, because that's like surely the ultimate

artificial experience, right? Is doing something that's literally not happening, but you experience it. And that could be, that could be really fascinating. I mean, it'll be its own fucking dystopia. Like don't get me wrong. But the fact that like you can get these like wild experiences that like no escape room could ever offer. And you, and you don't even need to like leave your house or anything. Like that could really, a one time VR class where you can learn the way of the bleed. But thank you, Will Keith. Here's the thing, right? Like, this is that is that this is, it's, it's taking closer and closer and closer as it gets more and more and more abstracted to basically the kind of any kind of human agenda setting or an ingenuity, any human agenda setting power or

human capacity for ingenuity is becoming less and less and less necessary as more and more people are simply just policy takers where there's like three people who are setting the agenda. And everybody just rides Ubers to and from their, their Amazon drop off and then their experience economy thing. And they're fucking past a making class and then their job where they copy things from one spreadsheet to another. That whole sentence sounds like something Liz trust would tweet on ironically. She'd be like, this is great. It's about not being a policy taker, but being a policy maker. We're riding an Uber to our past a making class with our friends that we met online. We all know about famous freedom fighter, Winnie Mandela really did fight just

for like, you know, this is that sustenance of delivery. Oh, of course. No, but it's, that's the right to steal the honey from forever. She goddamn please. It's just, it's, it's just, it's just that, that this whole thing is about is basically just about is about the human element of your own life becoming less important and making it so that your life could basically be lived by anybody because it's all been kind of smoothed over and the choices have basically been made for you at this stage. And so really, I mean, we say what next? I mean, I don't know, revolution. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I actually was going to say on a positive note, I do think that it means that if you go against that grain, which you can do when it comes

like experience economy, you can do that very easily. So we're doing now. Exactly. Right. You know, I don't experience anything. I just sit in a black and darkened room. That's kind of, that's my revolution. I close the curtains. I lock the door, try and make me experience something. I refuse. Try and make myself feel something. Yeah. Yeah. Play the play for Smiths in the back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. Yeah. Writing spectator columns. Yeah. Yeah. But in all seriousness, I think that what it does mean is that if you can recognize the negative undercurrent of the experience economy, then it

gives you a great, almost like a superpower. You mean you can basically be like, well, I'm just not going to do that. And as soon as you realize how much more you can get out of, yeah, I don't know, like starting up a music space that does have like the same DJ every week. And you do build like a community around things. Like suddenly building up small artistic communities has so much more power. You're giving Riley ideas to like set up a pop-up like techno. No, techno, techno place. Oh, I total, I mean, we haven't talked, we haven't talked about me being in Burghine in a while. Burghine head. That's just Riley explaining the Frankfurt school over a minimal beat. No, it's like, that's the thing. It's like, it's, it's, I'm all about, I'm all about music in Berlin

and philosophy and Frankfurt via Geneva and LA. Anyway, but I think that that's totally right is that the way to cure this is, is by understanding that like the best way to experience culture isn't to sort of take it in either through either passively or through experience, but or through the experience economy, but by sort of either critically engaging with it or just fucking making it. Yeah, exactly. It's participation that goes beyond experience. Like experience isn't participation and there only is like just viewing something. It is actually about building community and being a part of it. Hell, motherfucking yeah. Hell yeah. That's a fucking dunk. I'm ready to end on boys. Hell yeah. Very nice. Great. Well, we're off to, we're off to

escape room. Yeah. We've actually got a hot date and a ball pit, so I'll see you guys. Guys. The trash future escape room upcoming episode. Angus, thank you very much for coming on. This was an excellent episode. We've been wanting to do for a while. It's a pleasure.